Profound changes in thought processes and in personality and social structures were brought about by the invention of writing and the transformation from one stage of consciousness to another: from primary oral cultures to literate ones.
Ong surveys and interprets the extensive work done by himself and others on the differences between orality and literacy
Thought and expression in oral cultures is often highly organized but calls for organization of a sort unfamiliar to and often uncongenial to the literate mind. This organization is basically formulaic, structured in proverbs and other set expressions. It is aggregative rather than analytic, participatory rather than distanced, situational rather than abstract.
Literacy transforms consciousness, producing patterns of thought which to literates seem perfectly commonplace and “natural” but which are possible only when the mind has devised and internalized, made its own, the technology of writing.
Heavy oral residue has marked literature and thought until very recent times.
Revises our understanding of Homeric poems and present day African epics and other oral genres across the globe
Applies new insights into the rise of abstractly philosophical and scientific thinking
Effects on speech act theory, reader response theory, media studies, social sciences biblical studies, etc.
Traces orality of language from pure oral to pictograph, hieroglyphs, alphabet, phonetic alphabet, etc. To computer.
We should reawaken to the oral character of language
Computer languages, which resemble human languages in some ways are totally unlike human languages in that they don’t grow out of unconsciousness but directly out of consciousness
All written texts are connected to the world of sound.
Oral culture humans learn by apprenticeship, not study.
Ancient Greeks ==art of rhetoric, most meticulously worked out art—even in oral culture. Techne rhetorike speech art
When Greeks began writing did not reduce orality but enhanced it, making it possible to organize the principles or instruments of oratory into a scientific art.
Speeches were written after oralized.
Don’t say oral literature—orality and literacy.
Though oral cultures produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances, or high worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. So, don’t mourn the loss of orality.
Literacy consumes its own antecedents (can even destroy their memories) but can restore that memory as well.
Grim Bros etc. early recordings of oral tradition.
That’s why we have problems with Homer and repetition as moderns.
Memory played a very different role. Central, before invention.
They used and reused central and archaic epitaphs as memory aids, not rote memory.
Metrical needs drive choices
Set phrases, formulas, expected qualifiers, cliché
By Plato’s time, Greeks have “interiorized writing” things begin to change and Plato expresses serious reservations about writing as mechanical and inhuman, yet moves ahead. Unresponsive and destructive to memory Phaedrus. Yet, Plato survives because of writing. Ironically he writes to condemn writing. Sophists loved writing because could prepare oratory.
Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are occurrences, events, not things.
Sound as perishable and evanescent, moving, cannot be frozen.
Sound impels movement. See a buffalo, OK. Hear a buffalo, Move!
Spoken words have magical powers; names have power—not mere labels. See Gorgias.
Mnemonic patterns intertwined with memory systems, including muscle memory.
Redundant and copious because aggretive rather than analytic.
No use of syllogism, they will always go outside a syllogism, indicates syllogism is a component of writing only.
Words are not signs but sounds, for orals
Alphabet gives tightest control of idea communicated
Written vs. Oral contract. Marriage still oral.
Oral English 5000 words or less, written 1.5 million
Grapholects emerge, taking precedence.
Latin had no purely oral users because grapholect taught in schools to limited society.
Hearing dominance yields to sight dominance. But Sotto voce—read aloud takes eons to disappear
Evolution of human thought
9Characteristics of oral culture
additive rather than subordinative – written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependent simply upon linguistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential context which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar (38)
aggregative rather than analytic - the elements of orally based thought and expression tend to be not so much simple integers as clusters of integers, such as parallel terms or phrases or clauses, antithetical terms or phrases or clauses, epithets (38).
redundant or ‘copious’ – the mind must move ahead more slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer sure on the track (40).
conservative or traditionalist – oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This needs establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation (41)
close to the human lifeworld – in the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings (42)
agonistically toned – Not only in the use to which knowledge is put, but also in the celebration of physical behavior, oral cultures reveal themselves as agonistically programmed (44)
empathic and participatory rather than objectively distanced – learning or knowing manes achieving close, emphatic, communal identification with the known (45)
homeostatic – oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance (46)
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy.
(1988)